Integrate Dynamics 365 Data with BigQuery for Useful Analytics and Activation
A Step-by-Step Guide
Make the Most of Your Dynamics 365 Data in BigQuery
Dynamics 365 and BigQuery are a natural fit for data modeling, business intelligence and data activation – especially for retail brands interested in optimizing their overall business performance, acquisition and retention marketing programs, and merchandising and fulfillment operations decisions.
Dynamics 365 is an integrated suite of business applications that includes CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) functionality. It enables organizations to streamline processes, enhance customer engagement, and gain insights through data analytics. Dynamics 365 offers modules for sales, marketing, customer service, finance, operations, and more, providing a unified platform for business management. BigQuery is a serverless and cost-effective enterprise data warehouse that works across clouds and scales with your data. Use built-in ML/AI and BI for insights at scale. Together, the software application and cloud data tooling provide business and data practitioners with an opportunity to analyze and optimize retail ERP, WMS, POS and carrier platforms to drive profitable growth.
Connect to Dynamics 365
The first step toward useful, modeled Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery is to connect the source and destination systems. There are many legacy tools available in market that handle the ETL or ELT transfer of Dynamics 365 data to BigQuery, and there are emerging tools that accomplish this transfer while providing value-added services like local data logging, and semantic data labeling and mapping along the way – making Dynamics 365 data modeling, analytics and activation easier once the data is landed in BigQuery.
To connect to Dynamics 365, follow these easy steps
Open SoundCommerce in any browser. Open the “Intelligent Pipeline” application from the top right navigation menu. Select “Sources” from the left navigation menu. Choose “Add New Source” from within the Sources pane to open the data source library.
Search or browse to find “Dynamics 365” within the data source library.
Complete the “Connection Setup” form with your credentials and token to securely connect to Dynamics 365 and begin collecting source data.
Log Dynamics 365 Data for Flexible Modeling in BigQuery
There are a few more considerations to address along the way. First, what happens if Dynamics 365 is unavailable for some reason, or the data you’re expecting has been purged by Dynamics 365? What happens when Dynamics 365 changes their API schemas and data scope? What happens if you need to reinterpret your Dynamics 365 data for a new use case in the future?
You’ll want your Dynamics 365 data immutably logged locally, just upstream of BigQuery to ensure you have the data and data flow flexibility you need to future-proof your Dynamics 365 data and models. SoundCommerce provides permanent logging of Dynamics 365 data upstream of BigQuery to ensure failover and future-proofing. Regardless of how you connect your Dynamics 365 and BigQuery data, you’ll want a data lake or event log in the middle to ensure data integrity and modeling flexibility.
Define and Label Dynamics 365 Data for BigQuery
As new technologies arise and best practices evolve, traditional integration tools like ETL and ELT data pipelines are giving way to intelligent pipelines that help prep data for BigQuery starting at ingest. Simply moving JSON from Dynamics 365 to BigQuery leaves all the work for your data team in BigQuery.
As you onboard your Dynamics 365 data into BigQuery, you’ll want to create semantic labels and metadata that describe the Dynamics 365 data for easier unification and modeling across other systems and data in BigQuery.
There are third-party solutions that will catalog your Dynamics 365 data and generate semantic labels and mappings after you’ve landed it in BigQuery. With SoundCommerce, the Dynamics 365 data is defined and labeled on its way into BigQuery instead, to avoid this costly rework later. You’ll end up with business-ready entities like orders, customers, products and campaigns, making it much easier to model your Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery.
Map Dynamics 365 Entities to BigQuery
Once the raw Dynamics 365 data has been organized into useful entities, it’s time to map the Dynamics 365 data into useful tables in BigQuery.
Why do defined and labeled entities from Dynamics 365 matter so much? The main reason is that Dynamics 365 data needs to be combined with data from other SaaS and on-premise software systems in useful ways. Landing raw Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery without this semantic understanding means data engineering and analyst teams must do all of the heavy lifting regarding the meaning of the Dynamics 365 data and the standardization of the meaning of that Dynamics 365 data from scratch in BigQuery.
Defining, labeling and mapping the Dynamics 365 data on the way in means much less effort once the data is landed in BigQuery.
Materialize Dynamics 365 Data in BigQuery
Next, you’ll establish a secure connection to BigQuery:
Select “Destinations” from the left navigation menu. Choose “Add New Destination” from within the Destinations pane to open the data destination library.
Complete the “Connection Setup” form to securely connect to BigQuery to establish a secure destination for your labeled, mapped and modeled data.
That’s it! You now have logged, labeled and mapped data from Dynamics 365 flowing securely to BigQuery.
Model Dynamics 365 Data in BigQuery
Once you have well-formed entities from Dynamics 365 onboarded to BigQuery, it’s time to build useful analytical and behavioral models on the Dynamics 365 data – and combine the Dynamics 365 data with data sets from other systems in BigQuery for more advanced, cross-dimensional analysis.
You can build your own analytical models on the Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery using languages like SQL and Python, organized into model libraries in tools like DBT or Coalesce. With SoundCommerce, you get prebuilt analytical models for Dynamics 365 running in BigQuery, with ready access to the model source code in DBT.
Host the Modeled Dynamics 365 Data in BigQuery for Analytics
BigQuery supports reporting and visualization through a wide variety of analytics tools including Sigma, Tableau, Looker, Power BI and Microstrategy to name a few. You can build your own dashboards, tabular views and graphs in any of these tools to reveal insights about Dynamics 365 in your BigQuery models. SoundCommerce provides pre-built embedded reports in Sigma to reduce the time, cost and risk of BI reporting of Dynamics 365 data out of BigQuery – so you can start making better decisions and taking better action as soon as you’ve connected Dynamics 365 to BigQuery.
Host the Modeled Dynamics 365 Data in BigQuery for Campaign and Customer Activation
Whether your marketing team uses Dynamics 365 for activation – or uses other tools and channels or both to take action on the data – you’ll want to be able to easily move your modeled Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery to your most important marketing applications.
If you’ve followed the steps above to properly onboard and model your Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery, it’s easy to use reverse ETL (rETL) tools like Census or Hightouch to orchestrate the data from there, or use SoundCommerce native orchestrations to push data into common channels and applications like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Braze, Klaviyo, Insider or Dynamic Yield to put the Dynamics 365 data in BigQuery to use!
Getting Your Dynamics 365 Data Defined, Labeled, Mapped and Modeled in BigQuery is Easy!
SoundCommerce can automate the steps necessary to bring Dynamics 365 data into BigQuery, addressing the key functions of raw Dynamics 365 data logging, Dynamics 365 semantic definitions and mappings, and pre-built Dynamics 365 data models that are analytics- and activation ready in BigQuery.
Contact us today to get started with Dynamics 365 in BigQuery!
Technical Resources for Integrating
Dynamics 365 Data with BigQuery
More information and technical specifications for data collection from Dynamics 365 is available at:
Dynamics 365 API Documentation
More information and technical specifications for data ingest into BigQuery is available at: